Month: March 2004

A couple of points

John Quiggin13 Comments

The warblogosphere has gone into a predictably frenzy over the Spanish election results. In my previous post, I argued, from an antiwar position, that it was a mistake to interpret the result as punishment for Aznar taking a prominent stance in the struggle against terrorism. Now, following Micah’s advice I’ll present a couple of points that might be more convincing to those on the other side of the fence from me (or at least the subset who are open to argument of any kind).

First, it seems to be universally agreed, and was certainly believed by the PP government, that it would have electorally beneficial had it turned out that the bomb was planted by ETA. But the Aznar government was notable for its hardline stance against ETA. If the Spanish people were the cowards painted by their erstwhile admirers, this would make no sense.

Second (as far as I know), there has been no suggestion from the Socialists that Spanish troops should be withdrawn from Afghanistan[1]. If the Spanish people are terrified of bin Laden and want to appease him, it seems strange to show this through continued backing of attempts to capture or kill him and prevent the restoration of the only government that’s ever openly embraced him.

fn1. Of course, the same point applies to most opponents of the war in Iraq. The great majority supported the overthrow of the Taliban. Of the minority who opposed the Afghanistan war, most did not do so on prudential grounds but from a position of general opposition to US foreign policy (eg Chomsky).

The war on terror and the war in Iraq

John Quiggin14 Comments

The unexpected defeat of the Spanish Popular Party government has been attributed in part to the belief that by joining the US in the war in Iraq, Aznar raised Spain’s profile as a target for Al Qaeda ( which now seems most likely to have set the bomb)[1]. The same claim is being debated in Australia.

While there’s probably an element of truth in this, it misses the main point. Australia, Britain and other US allies were wrong to participate in the war in Iraq, not because it made us more prominent participants in the war on terrorism but because the Iraq war was irrelevant, and in important respects actively harmful, to the struggle against terrorism, represented most prominently by Al Qaeda.

fn1. This isn’t the only way in which the handling of the Madrid atrocity affected the outcome. The government’s rush to the judgement (seen as politically more favorable) that ETA was responsible was criticised by many, and contrasted with the refusal of the Socialist leadership to score political points.
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A sensible tax policy

John Quiggin4 Comments

One of the oddities of the past week is the belief, apparently near-universal among the Press Gallery, that Peter Costello scored a win over Labor last week as regards tax policy. In the boxing-match view of politics favored by the Gallery, Costello did indeed win several rounds – Labor shadow ministers contradicted themselves, appeared confused, and so on. But by Wednesday, thanks to Bob McMullan, Labor had a clear line, refusing to rule out new taxes and charges but promising not to increase the ratio of tax revenue to GDP. Three days of sneers and innuendo from Costello haven’t dented this line or produced any sign of a backdown from Labor. There’s no reason to suppose Labor can’t carry this line to the election. As McMullan points out, the endless sequence of special purpose levies introduced under this government, not to mention the GST, make any commitment of the form “no new taxes or increases in existing taxes” (literally) incredible. A commitment to a constant ratio of revenue to GDP leaves plenty of room for financing new spending initiatives simply by holding some existing programs constant in real terms.

Labor was always going to have trouble coming to a defensible form of words on tax and expenditure, and they had an uncomfortable couple of days. But the period of greatest danger in these things is the first few days after the position is taken, and this period has now passed. The effect of Costello’s attacks has been to solve Labor’s biggest problem six months before the real campaign.

If only you knew the whole story …

John Quiggin2 Comments

In the case of the dismissal of tenured professor Nona Gerard from Penn State (details here, Brian Leiter cites the generic response

Thank you for your email. President Spanier is out of the country so I am responding on his behalf. I will be sure he is aware of your opinion. I can assure you that there is much, much more to this than you are reading in the papers. I hope you realize that the University is also limited in what it can say publicly about this case at this point in time, especially given that the faculty member has already indicated she plans to file a lawsuit. I can also assure you that the University’s hearing process was followed explicitly at every step of the way.

“We have never taken away anyone’s job for criticizing the quality of a program, and we never will. You should also know that when five members of the University community who heard over 40 hours of testimony in what was a quasi-legal proceeding would vote unanimously that the faculty member was guilty of grave misconduct, there is not just smoke but a lot of fire. For the faculty member to make public statements about due process not being served is understandable in her circumstances, but simply untrue.

“What you have been reading in the press has simply not reflected the whole story.”

As it happened, I recently received an almost identical letter in relation to a property dispute in which I am peripherally involved. In both cases, I’m tempted by the simple response MRD> But I think it might be worth exploring the issues a bit further.
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Terrorism and guilt

John Quiggin22 Comments

There’s a lot of confusion about the perpetrators of the Madrid terrorist bombings, with a letter, purportedly from Al-Qaeda, claiming responsibility, and leaders associated with ETA disclaiming it. There’s evidence pointing both ways and, of course, it’s possible that more than one group was involved. Meanwhile, another letter, also purportedly from Al Qaeda, disclaimed responsibility for the even bloodier atrocity in Karbala last week.

I don’t think it’s necessary to come to a conclusive finding as to who set up which bombs. All groups and individuals that embrace terrorism as a method share the guilt of, and responsibility for, these crimes. Both in practical and symbolic terms, terrorist acts by one group provide assistance and support to all those who follow in their footsteps. The observation of apparent links between groups that seemingly have nothing in common in political terms (the IRA and FARC, for example) illustrates the point. Denials of particular accusations are beside the point unless they are accompanied by a renunciation of terrorism.

This point isn’t only applicable to terrorists. For example, governments that engage in, or endorse, torture in any context share in the guilt of criminals like Saddam, whether or not they were directly complicit in particular crimes.

Iraq, yet again

John Quiggin9 Comments

I’ve been meaning to post more on the situation on Iraq, but the complexity of the issues, and the rapid alternation of good, bad and ambiguous news makes things difficult. I’ve decided the best way to deal with things is to start with the big picture, and work down. At this stage, I don’t see any reason to change the prediction I made last November that the most plausible stable outcome in Iraq is, in fact if not in name, a two-state solution, with an Islamist Shiite majority government for Iraq as a whole, and the Kurds maintaining effective autonomy in the areas they already control. The recently-announced constitution contains various measures that are supposed to constrain this, but it’s already clear that they will be ineffectual. The Shiite leaders, most notably Sistani, have already stated that a document drawn up by an unelected council can’t constrain a democratically elected government. In any case, as long as they don’t challenge the regional autonomy of the Kurds, the Shiites will have all the votes they need to make the changes they want, particularly an enhancement of the role of Islam and the removal of requirements for power-sharing at the national level.

A second problem, pointed out by Alan at Southerly Buster is the attempt in Article 59 to maintain US military control until a permanent constitution is ratified, and a government elected pursuant to that constitution. This is the same kind of thinking that brought us the proposed regional caucuses. Faced with an elected government demanding the repudiation of this article, what are the Americans going to do? The article will fail in its intended purpose, but may cause a lot of trouble in the meantime. I predicted such an attempt, and its failure when I looked at the situation some months ago , and I see no reason to change this view now.

Despite these difficulties, and the still-real risk that the situation will collapse into civil war once it becomes clear that the historically-dominant Sunnis have been demoted to, at best, a subaltern role, I think the odds are in favour of a reasonably stable outcome.

Does this mean the war was justified? To answer this question, we need to ask two others: Compared to what? and Justified for whom?
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Johnny gets one right

John Quiggin15 Comments

Howard’s sudden announcement of a proposal that the Commonwealth should take over the hospital system may be the result of desperation for a “Big Idea”, as some say. Still, since I have long advocated this idea myself (see the AFR article below), I’m happy to endorse it. The mixture of state and commonwealth funding for health is a recipe for cost-shifting and administrative duplication. If the Commonwealth took over health completely, and somehow managed to hand the GST properly to the states, it would also largely resolve the problem of vertical fiscal imbalance.

While we’ re in the business of tidying up spheres of responsibilities, I’d suggest getting the states out of the university and TAFE sectors (although they get almost no state funding, most universities operate under state acts of Parliament) and the Commonwealth out of school funding.

Update: It appears that I overstated the definiteness of this proposal. Here’s a semi-denial from Howard. In the current quasi-campaign environment, it’s increasingly hard to tell what’s policy and what’s not.
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Optional preferential dominates approval voting

John Quiggin2 Comments

I thought I’d said my last word on voting systems, but it’s a topic that’s hard to exhaust. The comments thread to Brian’s latest post raised the notion of Approval voting in which you cast a vote for all candidates of whom you approve, the candidate with the largest number of votes being elected. I suggested that “the appeal of approval voting is mainly to people who can see the inadequacies of plurality (first past the post) but are worried about the supposed complexity of preferential” and the site linked above, with its frequent references to simplicity, supports this view.

I now want to make a stronger point. Approval voting is, for nearly all purposes, dominated by the “optional preferential” system, in which voters can list in order all the candidates whom they wish to give any support, leaving the remaining candidates unranked. In effect, optional preferential is an approval voting version of the preferential system, with the desirable property that voters don’t have to give any support to candidates they dislike. Given the data from on optional preferential ballot, it would always be possible to implement approval voting by disregarding the rankings given by voters, but its hard to see when this could ever be desirable.
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Who wants to be a semi-demi millionaire

John Quiggin8 Comments

Although parenthood pushed him into blogging hiatus eighteen months ago, David Morgan has had time to attempt become a millionaire. He faced the $500 000 question last night, on the length of Mercury’s rotation, picked the right answer (88 days), but wisely decided not to risk the $250 000 he already had.

Congratulations on his success!

In another manifestation of the mysterious BlogGeist, my thought processes watching the show were almost exactly parallel to David’s. I had the same guess, and a similar calculation that the expected utility[1] of backing my judgement would be less than that of the certain quarter-mill.

fn1. Rank-dependent, for those who care about exactitude in these things.